Inspiring reading for anyone who has ever dared to dream the impossible.
A celebrated endurance swimmer’s account of her life in the water and the attempts that led to her successful 2013 swim from Cuba to Florida.
Nyad’s future as a swimming star seemed fated. On her fifth birthday, her stepfather revealed that the last name he had given her not only meant water nymph, but also champion swimmer. Four years later, her mother pointed across the Straits of Florida and observed that the island that produced the culture Nyad had fallen in love with was so close “you could almost swim there.” She began training at age 10 and was soon competing at national championships. As much as she loved swimming for the highs it gave her, it was also an activity that helped her overcome the trauma of sexual abuse she faced from both her father and, later, a trusted swimming coach. By the time she had graduated high school, Nyad was a world-class swimmer, but she missed qualifying for the 1968 Olympics. She turned to open water marathon swimming in her early 20s. Fascinated by the idea of crossing from Florida to Cuba, she made one unsuccessful attempt to navigate the dangerous waters between Cuba and Key West in 1978; two years later, she ended her swimming marathon career to become a sports broadcaster and journalist. In 2010, at age 60, she began the first of four more attempts to swim between Cuba and Florida. Three years later, wearing a special protective suit and mask to protect against jellyfish stings, she managed the crossing in 53 hours. What makes Nyad’s story so remarkable, beyond the harrowing trials she faced at sea—unpredictable currents and weather, deadly sea animals—is the strength of a resolve that would not admit defeat and knew no boundaries. “Whatever your Other Shore is,” she writes, “whatever you must do…you will find a way.”
Inspiring reading for anyone who has ever dared to dream the impossible.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-35361-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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